The Spectator

2 August, 2011

From Jonathan Mirsky

The Fat Years

By Chan Koonchung

Translated by Michael S.Duke, Introduction by Julia Lovell

Doubleday 307pp

This creepy novel frightened me several times. Here is how Chan

Koonchung, raised in Hong Kong but now living in Beijing, does it: he

sets the story in a very near future, 2013, that closely resembles

China today, but with two creep-producing additional elements: an

entire month, during 2011, has vanished from almost all written

records, and almost everyone feels happy all the time. In addition to

not missing the vanished month, people no longer remember the Maoist

persecutions, the 1959-1961 famine in which 45 million starved to

death, and the Tiananmen killings. Chen, the novel’s central character,

who has lived most of his life in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but now lives

in Beijing, was a moderately successful writer before he moved to China

- and now can’t write a word. But he is happy, as is nearly everyone

else, except for Little Xi, an almost girlfriend from long ago, and a

few others others. Needless to say, this book was first published in

Hong Kong and never in China.

This is not the grim state of Orwell’s “1984” – in “The Fat Years” the

Party state provides most people with more than their material means,

intellectuals have never had it so good, and businesses like Starbucks,

now in Chinese hands, and shopping centres are thronged with well-off

customers.

This is creepy, at least for me, because, apart from the missing month,

it is mostly true today. Many Chinese under 30 are products of an

education system in which the past has been thoroughly distorted. For

them, Mao was a hero who restored China to international greatness, the

famine resulted from three years of bad weather and Soviet

manipulation, and Tiananmen was an anti-government “riot” by

”trouble-makers.” To describe these matters and much else in negative

terms is dismissed by many urban Chinese as “anti-Chinese” or, worse,

“destabilizing.” The Party has sold “stability” to hundreds of millions

as the reason for the relative prosperity in which many now bask.

But Chen is being got at by a few friends, like Little Xi, who are not

endlessly happy and know about the missing month of two years before.

Most of the time he resists them: he watches television, reads the

papers, and has intelligent friends. “I didn’t like to think that any

major event has escaped my notice. I believed in myself – my knowledge,

my wisdom, and my independent judgment.”[36] He goes to an intellectual

soiree and notices, with pleasure, the guests “harmoniously gathered

together in one place looking genuinely happy, even euphoric...This

really must bee a true age of peace and prosperity, I thought to

myself.”[38]  Indeed. Chen is living in the officially designated

Golden Age of Ascendancy, (The Chinese is “Shengshi Zhongguo 2013,”

“Ascendant China 2013”) and every day when he goes to Starbucks for his

Lychee Black Dragon Latté he feels happy because Starbucks, now part of

a global Chinese-owned consortium, is “a wonderful expression of

China’s soft power.” [45]

Chen is a book collector and one day visits a famous bookstore.  “So

many people are still reading books. Terrific! The sweet smell of books

in a literary society.”[38] He goes down to the empty basement. He

wants a particular book, but he can’t remember its name.“ ...I suddenly

felt I couldn’t breathe. Was the basement air that bad?” [39] Later he

meets Little Xi ‘s son, from whom she is estranged. Now a well-placed,

sinister member of the Propaganda Department, he tells Chen, “The

Propaganda Department guides the spiritual life of the entire

nation...Everything is under the Party’s and the government’s control;

they know everything.”[52]

Little Xi tells Chen that when she was a judge she refused to sentence

people to death simply to meet quotas and one day she woke up in a

mental hospital. “...I started to talk about the past, especially the

events around 4 June, 1989. They didn’t want to talk about it; their

faces went blank. When we talked about the Cultural Revolution, all

they could remember was the fun they had when they were sent down to

the countryside...They didn’t even know how to remember the bitter

past...Certain collective memories seemed to have been completely

swallowed up by a cosmic black hole, never too be heard of again.”[81]

Because Chen spent most of his life outside China he knows what others

have forgotten. He goes to the Chinese Amazon site and discovers there

are no books on that awful past. “He hadn’t realized that history had

been rewritten and the true facts had been airbrushed away.”[169] He

comforts himself. “Should we force the younger generation to remember

the suffering of their parents’ generation? Do our intellectuals have a

duty to walk through a minefield in order to oppose the machine of

state?” [170] After all, “only those books that contradict the Chinese

Communist Party’s orthodox historical discourse are totally banned:

[170] “90 per cent freedom. We are already very free now. 90 per cent,

or even more, of all subjects can be freely discussed, and 90%, or even

more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control.

Isn’t that enough?” 170]  (For some years I have heard British

champions of China today say almost exactly these words.)

I’m not going to reveal how the Chinese Party state in 2013 had managed

to erase a month and make everyone happy.  It’s not quite what you may

imagine.  A high official kidnapped by Old Chen and his friends tells

them that most of China’s leaders  “can definitely recall those

twenty-eight days, and they are also fully aware that the whole nation

is suffering from a form of both collective and selective amnsia.”

[304] Selective is the key word here. The official explains what is

only too true: “If the Chinese people themselves had not already wanted

to forget, we could not have forced them to do so. The Chinese people

voluntarily gave themselves a large does of amnesia medicine.”[ 305]

[Michael S.Duke has skillfully translated this novel and evoked its

creepiness. He and Julia Lovell contribute interesting and important